Now and on Earth by Jim Thompson Page A

realize now, knew that she had never been wanted-trying to make herself wanted; fighting at the last ditch with a weapon she had always scorned to use. Trying to make herself pretty. I thought of her fierceness, how with the animal's desperate impulse for survival, she had struggled against neglect and slight. The tantrums she had thrown to secure a new dress or a warm coat; her swiftness in striking before she could be struck; her dogged determination to have the food she desired-and needed. Yes, and her wakefulness, the fear of attack in her sleep.
    And I thought of how, during those four years that she had been with us, she must have wept in her heart, even as she fought and screamed; the loneliness that must have been hers; the fear and dread. And I thought Why did it have to be this way, and, as with everything else, I could find no answer…

    I was a 125-dollar-a-month editor on the Writers' Project that year. And Pop was losing his mind and I didn't know it. He came to me with a proposition-a lease deal-and it looked good. And I borrowed 250 dollars to swing it. Pop could never give a coherent explanation of where the money went. But it did go, never more to return, and I had fifty dollars a month to pay back out of my salary.
    Our rent was forty dollars. You can see how it was.
    One night I found Roberta in a faint on the bathroom floor, a swollen twist of slippery-elm bark protruding from her. And I thought she would be pulled apart before we could remove it. But Shannon-the bubble, the egg, whatever you want to call it-held firm. We went to see a woman down in Southtown. She took fifteen dollars from us, and prodded and poked Roberta with something that looked like a bicycle pump. She poked and pulled and pushed for more than an hour, and Roberta bled and fainted and writhed with the knowledge of the damnation that was to be hers. And Shannon fought again and won.
    She fought the sitz baths, the cotton root and ergot, the quinine. She fought the jolts that came from Roberta jumping off the divan, from climbing stairs, from hanging up clothes. No, I'm not being romantic. She did fight. You could feel her indomitability. Feel it and hate it as you would hate a drowning person who threw his arms around your neck.
    Then the doctor said it looked like she would be a Christmas baby-yes, sir, it did. And, finally, as the days passed, he became sure of it. And Roberta and I became ashamed of ourselves, and silently we prayed to Shannon for forgiveness. It would be all right now. We wouldn't starve. We could pay the doctor and the hospital. We'd always wanted her, we said. It was just that we didn't see how we could. Now, it would be all right.
    I should explain that Christmas babies in our town were sort of municipal property. All the banks and loan sharks made up cash purses. The stores donated clothing and furniture and food. You got a year's supply of milk and ice and stuff like that for nothing. You got- well, you got just about everything. You know. They probably do things the same way all over the country.
    At eleven o'clock on Christmas Eve I was sitting at Roberta's bedside in the hospital. The local florists had got wind of what was up, and flowers were already beginning to arrive. There was candy, too, and a big cake from one of the bakeries with "Happy Birthday Xmas Babe" spelled out on the icing. Even some reporters had been there to interview Roberta and snap her picture for the morning papers. Of course, the doctor was there, pacing back and forth and gloating over all the free publicity he was going to get, and asking the "little lady" how she felt.
    She felt fine. Not too good understand. But good enough. She felt, in short, like she was going to have the baby on Christmas day.
    Maybe it was the excitement. Maybe Shannon, distrusting us, sensed our will and rebelled against it.
    But at eleven-thirty Roberta's lips stiffened, and she groaned.
    The doctor wasn't alarmed. It wasn't a real bearing down pain. He